Revist:
New York Dolls
New York Dolls
1973
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
For those of us born too late, the picture of 1970s New York City that’s been painted for us is one colored with hues of Mean Streets-roughness, Taxi Driver-danger, Midnight Cowboy-squalor and Summer of Sam-uncertainty. New York in the wake of Altamont stands as a kind of idealized Babylon in minds of those who have only the associated records and movies to inform their contextualization; if you didn’t live through it, it’s hard to imagine another setting where a sense of decadence danced so closely with the kind of out-and-out terror that can only be created by millions of aggressive people living on top of one another in an uncertain political and social time.
Upon the release of the New York Dolls’ self-titled debut, the man who dubbed himself the Dean of American Rock Critics, Robert Christgau, lamented that anyone actually from Manhattan came from too bourgeois a background to really capture the island’s zeitgeist. “It takes brats from the outer boroughs,” he wrote, “to capture the oppressive excitement Manhattan holds for a half-formed human being the way these guys do.” The Staten Island-raised singer, David Johansen, along with principal songwriters Sylvain Sylvain (rhythm guitar, originally from Cairo) and Johnny Thunders (lead guitar, reared in Queens) formed the Dolls as a sort of distorted, glammy answer to the MC5 and the Rolling Stones. Their Todd Rundgren-produced debut, sounded like a noxious-smelling belch let out by NYC; it was the sound of a couple of young guys rampaging through the city while the city rampaged right back through their psyches.
“Personality Crisis” begins the record like an unexpected shock to the system, introducing the band’s language. Johansen sounds like the American wildman Mick Jagger always wanted to sound like, while Sylvain and Thunders rage on through Keef-like riffs that are as deafening as the collaborations of Wayne Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith. In the early years of the Me Decade, Johansen comments on all the young heads in the borough who are striving to be someone they’re not, putting whatever they can up their noses: “Now you’re tryin’ to be some/ No you got to do some/…But you think about the times you did/ They took every ounce,” Johansen growls, before commenting on “mirrors gettin’ jammed up with all your friends.” In the escape that New York offers, you’re free to do whatever you want- and be whatever you want.
Johansen finds the social life hilarious, if not exasperating, just wanting to get laid. On what has to be on the short list of candidates for Most Badass Rock Song, “Looking for a Kiss” has Johansen doing his best to avoid a girl’s party-people friends, in the hopes of getting her alone. While they’re shooting up, “obsessed with gloom,” Johansen’s trying to keep the night from being a total loss, making his booty call and trying to get it in before the sun comes up and all the old ladies are hurrying along to church. Not everyone’s personality crises are as trivial; “Vietnamese Baby” has Johansen raving on, possibly about someone having returned from the then slowly closing war preoccupied with shameful goings-on whose consequences are left overseas, while phased-drum beats resemble helicopter rotors and Thunders’ guitar howls like a caged animal after the choruses.
“Pills,” a Bo Diddley cover, has Johansen trying to make light of addiction, a song whose effect is all the more unsettling knowing that original drummer Billy Murcia drowned while intoxicated during the band’s first tour outside the States. “Trash” finds Johansen chafing at a girl’s suffocating love; its thrashy guitar and howling backing vocals are as good a vanishing point as any from which a lot of catchy punk songs can be drawn. Yet, for all the rapier wit and braggadocio, “Lonely Planet Boy” comes along, with unhinged “Gimme Danger” acoustic guitar and mournful backing “ooh”s and Johansen unable to connect with an object of affection. He offhandedly mutters “my little runaway…” as the song draws to a close, one of many oddball references to early ’60s pop songs- music that patently uncool at the time of New York Dolls’ release.
It took me until I was 26 years old to finally hear this record; it’s too easy to take the New York Dolls for granted, 35 years after the its release. It’s a music nerd’s dream; among its hidden charms are those references to relatively obscure pop songs, Johansen out-Jaggering Jagger and Rundgren’s occasional Moog contribution. Perhaps what’s barred it from entering into that populist, College Dorm Room Essentials canon is the band’s glam leanings; for a generation whose musical tastes have been informed by serious, flannel-wearing men almost puritanical in their distrust of anything fun, hair metal is the boogeyman. But where Sebastian Bach looked like a Tiger Beat pin-up, Johansen and company looked like thug trannies packing switchblades. I can’t think of a better group of cultural ambassadors from ’70s New York to the present day, able to capture the era’s evident gaudiness, danger and sleaze. It’s only they who could pose the kind of question like “Do you think that/ You could make it/ With Frankenstein?” inspiring laughter and a sense of malice simultaneously.
by Chris Middleman
